Eliminating at an undesired location (i.e., inappropriate elimination), typically indoors, is a common reason that pet owners get rid of pets. While not necessarily catastrophic, the consequences of inappropriate elimination include soiling and/or damage to floors, rugs, carpets, furniture, and other objects that requires expensive cleaning, repair, and/or replacement to rectify.
Housebreaking is a training technique, typically used with dogs, aimed at encouraging appropriate elimination by teaching the animal to consistently eliminate in a certain location. Housebreaking an animal can be a difficult and time consuming process requiring constant attention on the part of the pet owner. As with any training process, prompt and consistent reinforcement is an important factor in the speed and success of housebreaking an animal. If the reinforcement is not clearly linked in time to the behavior, the animal may not properly associate the reward with the behavior as intended by the pet owner. A common problem that occurs during housebreaking is that a pet owner lacks sufficient time to fully housebreak the animal before having to be away for extended periods (e.g., going to work). As a result, the animal being housebroken is unsupervised and appropriate elimination is not rewarded. This lack of prompt and consistent reinforcement frustrates and lengthens the training process.
Although frequently thought of as encouraging outdoor elimination, housebreaking is also used to train the animal to eliminate in a certain indoor location. Even when the indoor location is generally resilient to the soiling or damage from elimination (e.g., vinyl flooring), it is desirable to make cleanup as easy as possible and minimize contamination using tools such as disposable pads. Ideally, housebreaking teaches the animal to eliminate on the disposable pad. The soiled pad is then discarded without the need for additional cleanup. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.